What happens when a patient clicks on a practice’s website, and it is slow to load?
You guessed it. They click off the page and move on to find another.
In fact, studies have found that 40% of users click off of a website if it does not load in 3 seconds or less.
What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
I’ve written before about the importance of a patient’s mobile experience when visiting your practice’s website.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short) helps take a patient’s mobile experience to the next level.
The AMP project, is an open source project which is backed by some major companies such as Google, Twitter, and WordPress.
AMP is designed to make web pages much faster when accessed from a mobile device.
The main goal in utilizing AMP for your practice is so patients won’t click off your website if it is slow to load on their phone.
AMP Helps Webpages To Load Really Fast
The best way to describe how AMP works is that it’s like a diet version of HTML. This means that the developers really need to optimize the code (i.e. No JavaScript, streamlined CSS, and not using certain HTML tags).
This makes the webpage then totally optimized for reading, and for speed. As the user scrolls through the page, things like images will load “on demand” instead of at the beginning, making the experience much smoother and faster.
What Is The Process Of Creating AMP Pages?
In the source code, the webmaster will create a second version of each webpage, and create an AMP version with the optimized HTML.
Then when a user accesses the site/page via a mobile device, the website will detect the user’s mobile device, and bring up the AMP version of the page automatically.
How Does AMP Affect SEO?
Google says that AMP alone is not a ranking factor (yet!).
However, because Google now has a mobile first indexing approach, and AMP does positively affect what Google sees as a better user experience, this will have an impact on SEO.
In our experience managing physician websites, AMP has had a positive impact. Google does measure bounce rate and site speed as factors, so it makes sense that AMP would help a website’s rankings.
We have even seen that both the AMP and standard versions of a webpage ranked for specific keywords. While we don’t expect this to happen for long, the more listings a practice can have in Google search, the more new patients will discover them.
Conclusion
Because of Google’s backing, it looks like AMP is the way of the future for mobile.
The faster your practice can develop and execute an AMP strategy, the better.
